Lawmakers and policy experts in Washington sharply criticized the Trump administration’s decision to allow sales of H20 artificial‑intelligence chips by Nvidia (downgraded chip version) to China.Â
The experts questioned why the White House approved the move and if it is really tied to the June trade agreement reached in London between the US and China, as officials have claimed.
In April, President Donald Trump had banned exports of the H20 chip, a version of Nvidia’s technology designed to comply with existing export restrictions put in place under Joe Biden. That prohibition came amid an intensifying trade dispute between Washington and Beijing.
This month, however, the administration reversed course shortly after President Trump had a meeting with Nvidia’s founder, Jensen Huang, just before departing for a state visit to China.
The US agreed to loosen AI export controls to access China’s rare earths
Under the terms of the June London accord, the United States agreed to loosen some export controls in return for improved access to China’s rare earths. Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Commerce Secretary and a member of the negotiating team in London, told CNBC that H20 chips were “put in the trade deal with the magnets” on July 15.
He added, “We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best. The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it,” explaining the aim was to draw Chinese developers deeper into the US technology ecosystem.
On that day, Scott Bessent spoke to Bloomberg, describing the decision to resume H20 exports as “all part of a mosaic.”Â
Yet just a month earlier, in June testimony before Congress, Bessent had denied any “quid pro quo” involving chips and rare earths. When asked about the apparent contradiction, the Treasury Department declined to comment.
Not everyone is satisfied with the decision
Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, posted on social media that he “independently” knew the H20 chip was not on the table during the London talks.Â
He noted that the administration had first said the chip was excluded and then backtracked. After China’s Commerce Ministry suggested on Friday that the U.S. had acted independently, Doshi wrote that the “evidence for a unilateral cave is overwhelming.”
Meanwhile, Representative John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, wrote Lutnick last week seeking a briefing on how the Commerce Department plans to handle export license applications for the H20 chips.Â
“If the U.S. is serious about leading in AI, we need to protect our advantage—not hand it over,” Moolenaar cautioned in his July 17 letter, recalling that Lutnick had testified in February that America must prevent China from “using our tools to compete with us.”
Jensen Huang himself has publicly criticized U.S. export limits. During a visit to Washington in May, he called the controls a “failure.” As Nvidia’s higher‑end chips remain blocked, China’s telecom giant Huawei has stepped up its push to develop domestic AI processors as substitutes.
Kelsey Quinn, an emerging technologies expert at the New Lines Institute, said the decision to reopen H20 exports is “deeply unpopular in Washington on both sides of the aisle.”
She argued that by presenting the move as one small part of a broader trade strategy, the administration hopes to “pre‑empt criticism” and show that concessions are mutual, while securing greater access to essential rare earth minerals.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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